Empowering Social Media to Deliver

How To Boost Website Traffic Using Facebook and Instagram Ads

The dominant currencies of the modern digital world consist of likes or retweets or shares or views. But website hits still do matter. Maybe not as much as in 2008, but they still do. Here’s why:
E-commerce websites still register significant traffic on its websites as compared to apps. According to LSA’s (Local Search Association) April 2017 report, “The Digital Consumer Study,” 63% of consumers use websites to find or engage with businesses. Google still gives website-specific elements more important than social-specific elements for SEO and local rankings.

Even though social media platforms are more popular, websites, clearly, are not going anywhere. If anything, they might become even more important as the focus shifts to seamless marketing strategies using wearable technology and augmented reality. The idea behind modern digital marketing should not be to write off websites, but to drive traffic to your website using social media.

So your social pages have many likes and high engagement. How do you convert that into website traffic?

Facebook (and by extension Instagram) boasts of a solid advertising platform. The set-up is easy, the targetting is precise and the ROI is pretty good. Brands and marketers who are not taking complete advantage of Facebook and Instagram’s ad platforms are getting left far, far behind the the race.

Facebook Ads

Facebook gives you the option to create ads for literally anything and everything. You can drive app installations, gather more likes on your Facebook page, collect leads, promote an event, etc. Similarly, some Facebook ad types let you drive traffic to your website.

Primary among these is the Standard Link Post Ad.
A primary link post ad is basically a clickable image post or video post that drives traffic to your website. Facebook lets you customize the Call-to-Action (CTA) button on these posts. For example, for a newly launched product, you can use ‘Shop Now’, or to guide users to a landing page to collect their infomation, you can use ‘Sign up’. Clicking on the CTA takes the user straight to your website’s landing page.

An interesting new idea is the Carousel Ad.

Carousel ads allow you to create an ad with a series of image ads in side-to-side panels. Each of these panels can contain a different image post. This kind of ad format is best suited for when you want to promote multiple products or want to indulge in advertising via storytelling. Each panel contains a separate CTA for separate links to your website’s individual product/service pages. You can also customize the text under each image in each panel. The last panel of your carousel ad takes the viewer to your website’s homepage.

Instagram Ads

Ever since Facebook acquired Instagram, the ‘user base is fine but how will the platform generate revenues?’ voices died down. Even skeptics knew Facebook would do something remarkable with Instagram once it acquired it. And the best testimonial of this came when Facebook supplemented the Instagram platform with its own ad system.

Instagram ads are almost as effective as Facebook, benefit from a vast user base and are pretty solid from an ROI point of view too.

Like Facebook, Instagram too has a Standard Link Post Ad. Unlike Facebook, you cannot randomly boost a post. All link ads have to be mandatorily accompanied by a CTA button such as Sign Up or Learn More. While this does drive down the overall reach, it also means more relevant lead generation by ratio.

Instagram’s Carousel Ads are also similar to those of Facebook. Instagram allows only 5 panels in its carousel ads. Considering the app’s quick use demographic, this makes sense in terms of the storytelling you want to do with your ads.

Organic reach has seen a substantial drop on social media platforms, especially Facebook. To drive traffic to your website, you are going to have to depend on two primary policies – innovation with organic content and acceptance of paid ads.

Good web traffic can help you achieve business goals, and social media can help you drive substantial web traffic.